Average Real Pricing (ARP): The Future of the Price Guide

There's an oft-repeated, widely held misconception amongst vintage card collectors, one that reeks of that “old money vs. new money” elitism. That misconception is that new cards—cards made in the last 10 years—are worthless.

It’s not true, of course. After all, anything can have value if someone is willing to purchase it. The problem is, unlike cards manufactured prior to 1970, new cards are probably not worth as much as collectors are led to believe. Whereas the market and value for older cards is more stable, the value of a new card is dictated not so much by what the market will actually pay, but by an artificial, out-of-touch price: its “book” value.

Since the rise of the nationally consulted price guide in the early 1980s, “book” value has been determined by an aggregate tally of prices reported by a network of sources within the hobby, mostly card shop owners and touring show dealers. The reported prices were accurate and reliable because that’s where collectors bought cards: at hobby shops and at card shows.

But over the last 10 to 15 years, with the rise of online shopping and big-box, one-stop-shopping stores like Walmart and Target—combined with the dwindling number of card shows and hobby shops—the tried-and-true price guide model stopped working.

So why base pricing on reports from people with only half the story? One theory is that it preserves the card-collecting industry. Without a somewhat-inflated baseline, whatever shops and touring dealers remain would flag and fail. Another theory is that this model is still used because it’s convenient. Changing how book prices are determined would undermine more than 30 years of labor of transforming a hobby into a gigantic industry. And while changing the nature of how and from where prices are collected would erode the “wink-wink” dealer advantage and definitely shake things up, nobody wants to see the hobby fail. We just don’t want to be lied to anymore about the true “value” of our cards.

Enter the average real pricing guide, or ARP guide. With monthly prices based on realized prices of new, raw card sales from various Internet auction sites, any card’s ARP will be much more accurate than a traditional price guide’s pie-in-the-sky value.

Let’s look at an example. Topps 2013 Series Two came out in mid-June. And while most collectors don’t expect base cards of a flagship set like Topps—with a total print run probably into the millions of cards—to hold their value long-term, how should we value short-printed cards like the on-checklist variations? Realized prices from September and October were used to find the ARP values of 17 variations (see table below).

Card # & Player	ARP Value	Unregulated ARP Value*	Trad. Price Guide Value Range (Dec.)
1C Bryce Harper Sunglasses SP	$14.78	$14.66	$12.50–$30.00
10B Adam Jones Sunglasses SP	$4.95	$4.85	$5.00–$12.00
11C Yu Darvish Sunglasses SP	$5.93	$6.02	$5.00–$12.00
27C Mike Trout Sunglasses SP	$10.30	$10.19	$8.00–$25.00
28B Prince Fielder Sunglasses SP	$4.26	$4.07	$5.00–$12.00
34B Felix Hernandez Sunglasses SP	$3.13	$3.60	$5.00–$12.00
55B Tim Lincecum Sunglasses SP	$4.25	$4.25	$5.00–$12.00
110B Justin Upton Sunglasses SP	$2.38	$2.49	$5.00–$12.00
122C Andrew McCutchen Sunglasses SP	$5.64	$5.72	$6.00–$15.00
127B Giancarlo Stanton Sunglasses SP	$4.31	$4.10	$5.00–$12.00
242C Matt Kemp Sunglasses SP	$2.91	$2.91	$5.00–$12.00
316B Josh Reddick Sunglasses SP	$3.01	$3.23	$5.00–$12.00
362B Yoenis Cespedes Sunglasses SP	$4.20	$4.02	$5.00–$12.00
456B Pablo Sandoval Sunglasses SP	$3.47	$3.39	$5.00–$12.00
595B David Ortiz Speech SP	$17.06	$17.77	$10.00–$25.00
660B Miguel Cabrera Sunglasses SP	$7.43	$7.60	$6.00–$15.00
661B Hyun-Jin Ryu Sunglasses SP	$4.40	$4.42	$5.00–$12.00

*Unregulated ARP contains high and low in range.

The ARP values here aren’t arbitrary, like the traditional book values feel—the ARPs are made up of actual realized prices for raw cards on major Internet auction sites. (It’s important to stress that ARP values are for raw cards only. Graded cards are a different beast, and are not part of these calculations.) To determine each price, an aggregate of realized prices for each card was taken from a given a date range. Next, the highest and lowest prices were removed to avoid skewing the result (See note on Unregulated ARP above*). Whatever was left was factored into the ARP. In those few cases where five or fewer prices went into the price calculations, all prices were factored in. (In the example above, only the Kemp had five or fewer sales.)

One interesting quirk about an ARP value is that the number of individual prices that go into each average is not uniform. For instance, if a Yasiel Puig card is sold 20 times but a Dustin Pedroia is only sold 6 times, shouldn’t all 20 Puig prices be used to find its ARP? It’s a more popular card, after all. I used date cutoffs rather than number of individual prices. These values reflect whatever happened between September 1, 2013, and October 31, 2013.

And about that middle column... While the ARP is the more accurate of the two price values, the Unregulated ARP (UnARP) contains the single highest and single lowest values left out of each ARP range. With these values factored in, the ARP and UnARP form an accurate range of high and low for a given card (it doesn’t matter which is higher or lower). For example, your Felix Hernandez “Sunglasses” short-print variation in 2013 Topps Series 2 is valued between $3.13 ARP and $3.60 UnARP. This is how much you should expect to pay for it, and how much you should expect to get for it should you decide to sell it. Notice how the expected buy and sell price ranges are the same?

“Book” value has long been the starting point for negotiations, or baseline for dealers offering to buy cards. If a card books for $20, a dealer will usually pay 20% to 40% of book to buy, then turn around and charge 60% to 90% of book when selling the card. The dealer has to protect his profit margin in order to stay in business. That’s one of the inherent functions of the book value and a wrinkle in how the hobby currently works.

An ARP value doesn’t have to protect a profit margin. Internet auction sites don’t care who’s buying or who’s selling. You want to buy that Ortiz “Speech” SP? Expect to pay between $17.06 and $17.77 for it. You want to sell the same Ortiz SP? Guess how much you should expect to get. That's right: between $17.06 and $17.77. 

A level field is a new concept, one that won't be embraced by dealers. I expect the traditional price guides will fight ARP at every turn. But here's why you should use it if you buy and sell new, raw sports cards: it's accurate. And as you can see from the table above, "accurate pricing" and "book" value are rarely synonymous.

How To Save The Base Set

How long has the flagship Topps base set been dead? Since 1996? Maybe not that long, but it sure has felt like that. Instead of a checklist interspersed with All-Stars, team cards, and subsets, almost a generation of flagship base set checklists have been divided as follows: one or two series, each made up of 300 to 400 base cards of individual players, followed by a string of team cards, then designated rookie cards, then perhaps, if you're good, between five and ten "fun cards," that aren't all that fun, just action shots with different headlines. Fun subsets like Turn Back The Clock, All Stars, Record Breakers, Season Highlights, World Series, and even Father/Son are long gone. 

Instead, the base set checklist is overrun with short (or single) prints, and recently, super-short prints. Sure, finding an SP or SSP in a pack is fun, I'm not going to deny that. But when companies don't want to expand the base set checklist (thus SPs, variations, and SSPs hiding behind regular base card checklist numbers), the idea of adding a subset or two (or three or four) would mean removing a handful of rookie-card slots or end-of-the-bench players who might turn out to be diamonds in the rough.

Here's a solution. First off, don't touch the SSP idea; it's a draw for too many collectors. But instead of hidden base-checklist SPs, add subset cards as base-checklist variations. And don't short-print them, either—seed them 1:1 or 1:2, in a different pack position than inserts or SPs are traditionally placed. Packs will become livelier thanks to these accessible SPs. Although SPs in name only, the subsets would still be hidden off the regular base-set checklist. This way, the checklist holds steady at 600 or 700 cards, with a "master" base set checklist of 650 to 800 cards completely accessible to collectors not interested in spending lots of cash for expensive short prints. 

Of course, this idea may not work for all sets. A set I'm looking forward to is Heritage '65, due Spring 2014. Unless an asteroid hits Topps HQ in Lower Manhattan in the next few months, my educated guess is that the checklist will have at least 75 on-checklist SPs, with chrome and refractor parallel sets, plus the tired Heritage stable of inserts News Highlights, Highlights, Then & Now, and New Age Performers. It's incredible to me that these insert sets keep chugging along, despite wearing out their welcome years ago, but that's a topic for another day. Let's just focus on the base checklist. 

What if Topps shook things up? Like by removing most if not all of the base-checklist SPs. For clarification, I'm not talking about hidden variations. If anything, by unlocking these 75 or so numbers from short-print status, it opens the possibility of adding meaningful shadow SPs. 

Take the original checklist from 1965 Topps, for example. It's chock full of retiring legends, Hall of Fame rookie cards, and exciting stars. To revitalize the Heritage checklist, take a page from the All-Time Fan Favorites sets and create shadow SPs of players like Yogi Berra, Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and others on their original checklist numbers but using different photos than their original cards. 

This will allow collectors to be able to complete the regular set without breaking the bank, but also add a twist for master set collectors. And this is just the thing a set like Heritage needs—heck, like any set these days needs: a revitalization of the base-set checklist from the inside out.